The Impact of Cost and Network Topology on Urban Mobility: A Study of Public Bicycle Usage in 2 U.S. Cities

摘要

Understanding the drivers of urban mobility is vital for epidemiology, urbanplanning, and communication networks. Human movements have so far been studiedby observing people's positions in a given space and time, though most recentmodels only implicitly account for expected costs and returns for movements.This paper explores the explicit impact of cost and network topology onmobility dynamics, using data from 2 city-wide public bicycle share systems inthe USA. User mobility is characterized through the distribution of tripdurations, while network topology is characterized through the pairwisedistances between stations and the popularity of stations and routes. Despitesignificant differences in station density and physical layout between the 2cities, trip durations follow remarkably similar distributions that exhibitcost sensitive trends around pricing point boundaries, particularly withlong-term users of the system. Based on the results, recommendations fordynamic pricing and incentive schemes are provided to positively influencemobility patterns and guide improved planning and management of public bicyclesystems to increase uptake.